Today we had our second AfterEffects workshop. We were shown how to import a video into our composition. Before we started, we had to film a short piece of footage of ourselves in front of a large green piece of card. Once we imported this video into AfterEffects we were shown how to remove the green background and replace it with an image of our choice. I decided on an underwater theme and therefore imported a sea background. I was then taught how to mask the fish to place them in front of the video to get a 3D feel. Once we were happy with this we carried on exploring the different ways to animate our text. To improve this clip further I could try animating the fish to move, creating a more life like scenario.

In this weeks workshop we started to look into motion picture creation in Photoshop. As this was an introduction we were given the necessary images to create this running man gif. The following seminar however, helped us draw each picture in a sequence, to which we then checked our work using a Praxinoscope. We were told to convert each layer into a frame slightly nudging the following image in order to create the illusion of the man walking. Here we could play around with delay time until we were happy with a smooth motion. To save as a gif I then clicked ‘save for web’. This workshop was very helpful as it targeted this week’s task of creating a gif. I hope to practice further by drawing and finding walk cycles online to improve this skill.

Today was our second workshop, this was our introduction to programming and Java. We started off by learning keywords and some common misconceptions about programming to ease us in. We then moved on to a practice task where i leant about the syntax of Java and how every programming language follows a similar structure. We worked in a program called ‘Processing’ which also supports both Javascript and Python. Here is a screenshot of some basic programming from the workshop.

I hope to carry on and practice independently by looking at tutorials and examples on ‘processing.org’ to gain confidence and skill.